Friday, 10 August 2012

Back in the Groove?

Two weeks ago we arrived back in the UK to a bitter winter evening and the potential for serious hypothermia. We have sort of re-acclimatised thanks to a suitcase of wooly socks, vests and padded shirts that we had in storage. The winter wind no longer whistles round my ears thanks to my rediscovered wooly hat but the damp greyness is hard to get used to again.
We are currently jobless and homeless, staying temporarily with my daughter until we get our lives sorted out again - and therein lies the problem:
Our time in Nigeria has been jammed full of experiences and left us with mixed emotions regarding what we want to do next. We have gone from being appreciated and valued by many people to being ignored and marginalised by many people, such that we don't really feel we fit in any more. We certainly don't feel that the jobs we were doing in the UK before we left with VSO were making the difference we felt we were making in Nigeria.
We have gone beyond the phase of wanting to tell everyone who was patient enough to listen, about our experiences, answering their polite questions and showing them our photos ans video clips. We are not coping too well with the understandable follow-up question: 'So what are you going to do now?'

About Me

2010 - 2012 I was in Nigeria with my wife, Caroline. We had two year placements with VSO working in the education sector to improve the quality of teaching and learning in schools in Kwara State. We lived in a small ground floor flat in the Sabo-Oke part of Ilorin.
Summer of 2016 was spent working in a refugee camp in Greece, helping to set up English language classes, craft activities and assisting in the warehouse.
Both of these experiences inspired these blogs.